Tag: exploitation

things to tell u

I love making work as an artist and am utterly fatigued by earning money through other means. I’m intrigued by my own desire for financial security and my hatred of having to spend time doing things I don’t want to do for money. I question whether one can ever feel a sense of freedom and autonomy while working, if work is what enables survival. I feel guilty about the resentment I experience when I’m working jobs that aren’t related to my art practice. I also feel very grateful that I’ve had to do jobs that aren’t related to my art practice because I can’t imagine not having had the experiences I’ve had, the contact I’ve had with a certain kinds of reality. But making art for money is just as real a reality as making money in other ways. Isn’t it?  I fantasise about marrying a billionaire and only having to raise children and make art for the rest of my life while my partner happily finances my existence. Raising children is absolutely work – never-ending work. So, if I want to have children, I can’t really be wanting to escape work. I don’t want to escape effort. Effort makes me feel really good sometimes. I want to escape poorly paid work that I don’t enjoy doing. I want to be paid well. I want everyone to be paid well. I don’t actually want to marry a billionaire because I don’t think billionaires should exist. It disgusts me that someone can become a billionaire. This fantasy is the result of fatigue. Relationships can be hard work. Interacting can be hard work. What am I complaining about? I want to have the job of being a wife and a mother. I feel embarrassed about how much I want to do those jobs because sometimes it feels like women aren’t supposed to aspire to assume those roles anymore. Although really, it’s both. We are both pressured to want those things and to not want those things. For the last three years I have worked as a receptionist. This is also typically a “woman’s” role. When I get home from work, my mind is so overstimulated I want to scream but I’m too tired to do that. Working as a receptionist in a clean, air-conditioned office is relatively easy and privileged work. It still hurts my brain and my body to do it. I feel guilty that it hurts my brain and my body. Maybe if my pay was ten or twenty or fifty times higher it wouldn’t hurt so much. I want to use my body to make art and make money. My body is always with me. No one has to provide me with anything in order for me to use my own body. I don’t need to write a job application or ask permission to use my own body. As soon as I start using my own body to make work and money, new questions of autonomy and exploitation are raised. Who is in control? Do I want to be in control? There is relief in both having and relinquishing control. I want to lie around in hotel rooms taking photos of myself and get paid for it. “Lying around in hotel rooms taking photos of myself” is actually very tiring, I’ve been doing it for a long time and it also hurts my brain and my body. Not in the same way that working as a receptionist does, though, or working as a house cleaner or any of the other non-art jobs I’ve had. Maybe it’s the element of performance that is so tiring. When I’m taking photos of myself I’m performing. But I’m performing a version of myself that feels like it has always existed within me and that wants to exist. When I’m working other jobs I’m also performing but I’m performing an extra version of myself that feels like has been forced upon me and that I kind of wish didn’t have to exist. Do you respect me when I’m working hard? What can I do to earn your respect? Why do I want your respect? Do I want it?

plans, interests, research

I’m trying to refine and articulate my areas of interest/research, just noting some thoughts here.

  • Performing the self and inhabiting personas in the context of work, commodification and self-promotion.

  • Intersections of reality and fiction and how these can be integrated into the forms my work takes, the structure and presentation of the work, not just the subject matter.

  • Self-portraiture – history and contemporary context, especially in relation to the internet.

  • Using the body as work, intersections of selling one’s body/self and selling one’s art.

  • The search for freedom within inherently exploitative structures and hierarchies.

  • Theories of fantasy in relation to work, money, art-making.

  • Corporate aesthetics – their function and affect.

class 30/11/2023, Working Girl

In class we shared something that has inspired our art practice. I talked about the book Working Girl: On Selling Art and Selling Sex by Sophia Giovannitti (2023).

Some notes on Working Girl.

  • Sophia is an American artist and writer who also worked as a sex worker. In Working Girl she writes about her experiences of selling art and sex and the intersection of those things, drawing parallels between the two industries. She poses questions about what constitutes work, what constitutes art, what constitutes exploitation.

  • She writes that the commodification of both art and sex is “rampant” and “also rife with anxiety and subject to questions of ethics, purity, and meaning.” She states that we are told that art and sex are two things that should not be commodified as they are both “seemingly sacred forms of human expression, and we are taught to keep them close to ourselves, safe from capital’s voracious appetite. And yet, art and sex – and specifically the art and sex industries – are actually capital’s stress points: two industries saturated in hyper-capitalist relations while also existing on the outskirts of the formal economy. This may explain their profound material similarity: both are filled with wildly stratified price points, scams, blurred legal lines, and exploitation.”

  • Sophia compares the taboos of commodifying art and commodifying sex. And the perception of “sacredness” that can be projected onto both of these things. I think artists often experience guilt or conflict around wanting to make money from their art. I think a lot of us wonder about the compromise of commodifying your work to make a living doing the thing you love and wondering if commodifying the thing you love is going to ruin the thing you love or ruin the experience of doing the thing you love.Or make it less pure or sacred in some way. But also recognising that if you have to have another job or other jobs that you don’t necessarily enjoy but have to do for the money, then that takes time and energy away from doing the thing you love.
  • I’ve reached a point where I have no problem with the idea of only making money from art. To me that would be the ultimate gift and privilege. I don’t think that making money from art is without difficulty or caveats or compromise or stress or pain. But to be able to stop having to make money from jobs that aren’t related to my art would give me a lot of freedom – spiritually, creatively and logistically.
  • Another idea in this book and that I’m thinking about in my own project is that of exploitation and violation. Exploitation and consent is talked about a lot in relation to sex work, as it should be. But exploitation and violation can be present in all kinds of work and you could argue that having to perform any kind of service or action to earn money in order to survive cannot be devoid of an inherent exploitation, to varying degrees of course depending on the situation and the context and the level of inherent privilege and power held by the worker.
  • I consider often the physical and mental toll that the (non-art) jobs I’ve had have taken on me. Sophia writes about this, about they physical strain her body can feel after work (sex work) but that her body also felt strained after other work she has done – sitting at a desk or babysitting. “The body at work is necessarily traumatized, destroyed; this is more true in some jobs than others.”
  • I like the way that Sophia points out that selling sex and selling art both involve fantasy, that fantasy is “central” to selling both products. She writes, “Both markets prey on the universal desire for vigor, newness, intoxication, and a peculiarly earth-shifting – simultaneously immaterial and tactile – beauty.” Both art and sex hold great fascination for people. Reading this book I thought about how art and sex are often considered to be kind of “on the outer”, unique industries to work in. Sometimes revered sometimes stigmatised. In reality though, art and sex pervade so many aspects of the every day. Art and sex are everywhere, all the time.
  • Sophia discusses the corruption and hypocrisy that can be present in the art world, describing both the art and sex industries as being shaped by the “whims” of people who have extreme power and wealth. They are both “… structured at every turn by racism, hyper-visibility, the policing of people and borders, and the bottom line of profit.”
  • I’m still digesting this book. There is a lot I relate to in it. There’s one part where Sophia describes working in a restaurant and experiencing intense disrespect from patrons, comparing this with experiencing certain actions from clients while escorting such as being spat on and slapped during sex and comparing the degree to which she felt violated in each scenario and the hourly rate she was being paid in each. An experience that is really stuck in my own mind is when years ago I used to work as a house cleaner. I remember cleaning a particular house one day, usually the family wouldn’t be home but I think it was school holidays and a mother and her teenaged son were at home that day. The son was in his room and I felt hesitant about going in there to clean given that he was in the space. It’s kind of difficult to clean a room if someone is in it. But the mother said I should just go in there. The boy was lying on his bed playing video games. I said hello and he ignored me, staring at the huge TV screen opposite his bed. I awkwardly tried to clean up around him, he didn’t move or speak the entire time. I felt crushingly demoralised. There was something so humiliating about it. As an adult, cleaning up after a fifteen year old boy, for a minimal hourly rate, who is just lying on his bed in his room in his parent’s big beautiful home, completely ignoring your existence. It’s one of many similar memories that runs through my mind when I think about work. I guess I’m thinking again about perceptions of work and what it means to sell out or “sell yourself” or why “selling yourself” has a negative connotation. I can sell a custom self-portrait on OnlyFans to a subscriber. A self-portrait that is an image I have created with complete control over how I present my self/body, and that adheres to an artistic concept that is meaningful to me, an image that contributes to my larger body of work as an artist. I can sell this self-portrait for far more money than my hourly rate was as a cleaner. Yet because I am presenting that work on OnlyFans, it could easily be perceived as “just” selling myself or something that is sort of low or embarrassing or degrading or not real art. But it’s really not about the work you’re doing it’s about the feeling that work gives you and level of autonomy you feel.
  • I might write more about this book and how I relate the ideas to my own work later, I’m exhausted.

current thoughts and clarifications

  • My project is about freedom, confinement, exploitation, commodification, autonomy, work, money, the body, the body as work and performing the self.
  • I will use multiple forms to realise my project. I want to create a world for the project that inhabits physical and online spaces in various ways over time, not just within one outcome.
  • I want one of the outcomes to be a physical installation.
  • Right now I am focusing on creating a series of self-portraits that are a response to a line of poetry I wrote in 2020/21 which is “She has a body of work”. I am now responding to this provocation in a more expansive/free/imaginative way than I did when I began. I began by taking the self-portraits in literal “work”/office spaces. This was my way in to playing with the idea of “a body of work”. I’m still interested in this idea and aesthetic but I’m also now allowing myself to respond to the provocation in a more meandering, less literal way.